I'm an author and advisor who focuses on helping those doing good in the world. I call myself a "champion of social good." As a Forbes Contributor I cover social entrepreneurship and impact investing. My books on personal finance and crowdfunding draw on his entrepreneurial finance experience as an investment banker, CFO, treasurer, and mortgage broker in order to help people use financial resources to do good. Previously I worked on the U.S. Senate Banking committee staff and earned an MBA at Cornell.

Social Entrepreneur Says 'We Don't Need Facebook for Dogs'

Nothing summarized the Intersection Event better than Kushal Chakrabarti’s comment halfway through the day. Lobbying for the audience award of $5,000 for his social enterprise Vittana, he said, “We don’t need Facebook for dogs. Do something that matters.”

The Intersection Event, organized by Randy Haykin of The Gratitude Network, with colleagues Guru Singh and Dr. Chris Pitt, was convened at Google Headquarters to catalyze action among innovators and social entrepreneurs.

The highlights of the conference included an on stage interview with Barry Zito, All-Star pitcher for the San Francisco Giants who is active in social causes. Zito organized Strikeouts for Troops to support and raise money for injured American troops.

Reid Hoffman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of LinkedIn and since 2009, a partner at Greylock Ventures, participated in a panel discussion with Jason Yotopoulos, SVP at SAP, moderated by Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media. A few of the quips from Hoffman include:

“In a networked world, the question is ‘How do I put myself in the center?’”

He also noted that to build a movement, “you need network thinking.”

Commenting on ethics in business, he said, “Accepting, ‘It’s just business’ as an explanation makes as much sense as accepting ‘I’m just a sociopath.’”

On for-profit social ventures, “I’m skeptical of double bottom-line thinking.”

For his part, O’Reilly pointed out that “a nonprofit entrepreneur is still an entrepreneur.”

Frans Johansson, the bestselling author of the Medici Effect and his new book, The Click Moment, proved to be an entertaining and inspiring speaker. He then interviewed Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, who made the surprising comment, “I don’t seek feedback too early.” His point seemed to be that when an idea is poorly formed there is little value in soliciting feedback from others; instead, the idea needs to be incubated.

Williams also shared the history of Twitter, identifying the moments of serendipity rather than strategy that created the platform. For instance, one key partner in the business turned out to be his backyard neighbor; they only connected after the neighbor recognized the shared backyard in a photo and realized that his neighbor was Evan Williams, the founder of Blogger, which had been sold to Google.

Steve Jurvetson, the famed venture capitalist, and Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft CTO headlined a panel discussion on innovation moderated by Greg Brandeau. Jurvetson gave a brief presentation that proved to be inspiring to those hoping to play a role in changing the world. Talking about the technology curve that allows for the self-driving car to outperform humans in many situations already, Jurvetson noted that “my children may be among the first generation of people who will never learn to drive.” He quipped that “SpaceX will make it cheaper to fly around the earth in space than by air.” He also noted that “in the future, all cars will be electric” and with that, challenged the naysayers to argue the point after the session.

Chris Pitt moderated a panel on results-based education with Eric Nadelstern of Columbia University, Maureen Devlin, a classroom teacher in Wayland Public Schools, and Steve Hargadon, director of the Web 2.0 Labs. The discussion highlighted the need for both measuring performance of teachers and students but also for innovation that creates enthusiasm for teaching and learning.

Randy Haykin interviewed the elder statesman of venture capital, Bill Draper, who shared his history and the joy he gets from giving money away through his foundation, The Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation. He also talked about the process for writing his book, The Startup Game.

The lead-off panel for the day featured Helene Gayle, President and CEO of CARE USA; Sheryl WuDunn, bestselling author of Half the Sky; Lorraine Twohill, of Google; and moderated by Jennifer Pahlka, Founder and Executive Director of Code for America. Gayle said, that “to solve women’s issues we need to engage men.”

The organizers used the event to profile some great social enterprises that are having an impact in education. Three Gratitude Awards were given. Ten finalists, including Vittana, were invited to present briefly to the audience. The conference participants then voted on which of these would receive a $5,000 award. Judges chose the grand prize winner who received $20,000 and a runner up that also received $5,000.

The audience choice award went to Kytabu, led by Antony Ndungu. Kytabu is a textbook subscription application that allows students to lease pre-installed curriculum textbooks in bits as small as one page or a chapter on an hourly, monthly or yearly basis beginning at a tiny fraction of one U.S. cent.

The runner up award went to Zaya, led by Neil DSouza, which has developed an educational wifi router that operates for ten hours on batteries and is loaded with content for schools in the developing world where power and internet access are spotty.

The grand prize went to The World We Want Foundation, founded and led by Lori Bonn, which supports young change agents with grants. The funding comes through crowdfunded campaigns at theworldwewantfoundation.org.

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Wow, thank you so much Devin for this insightful article!! Too often we don’t the good in our daily news and truly appreciate this article and and all that you do to support social good!! Hat’s off to you and all the others that are making a difference!!

Bradley, Thanks for your kind comment. It was an inspiring conference. There are people working effectively to address every world problem. They all need help and support, but I am optimistic that much of what we see wrong in the world today can be eliminated in 30 years!

I’m still new to the world of tech journalism but I shared my thoughts here: http://www.policymic.com/articles/24292/what-does-the-future-of-innovation-look-like-thought-leaders-at-the-intersection-give-us-a-glimpse